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Comment by bla3 | Hacker News Reader

On one hand, it's commendable how seriously Microsoft takes backward compatibility. On the other hand, I can't help but feel that this is part of what's holding them back in their "modern browser" efforts. Edge felt like a new start but failed. Chromium Edge feels like yet another new start, but again is tied down by support for ancient IE versions from day one.

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On the Edge team and I can tell you, in no way, does supporting IE, hold back our development capabilities.

If anything, it enables more companies to adopt Edge without concern of breaking support for their legacy applications.

We see that Developers are the ones held back by older versions, and we see this as a huge win for them.

This is basically just a compatibility mode where you switch the IE renderer in the tab within the same Edge application "shell."

Seems like a no-brainer.

We're trying to figure out on my team what the Edge Team's plan for rollout on OSes with IE11 already installed looks like; e.g., will Edge Chromium outright pull and replace Legacy Edge _and_ IE11 from Win7? And is "IE Mode" going to be an option on the non-Enterprise version of Chromium Edge?

I'd love to see more messaging around the rollout intentions; plenty of us out here still supporting IE11 (non-Government, non-Enterprise) and trying to read between the lines to a point where we can start legitimately calling the time of death.

Will it be possible to 'remove' IE from Windows 10 (for example, via: Disable-WindowsOptionalFeature –Online -FeatureName Internet-Explorer-Optional-amd64) and then only allow users to access IE through the new Edge?

So implementing this took zero work? Probably not. Do you think it will cost nothing to maintain? Probably neither. So I don't see how "in no way" could be true.

I never said there wasn't a cost. Every technical decision comes with trade-offs.

But costs don't hold us back from developing amazing new features [for developers and consumers] for the future. <3

I work on the Edge team as well.

-- This is largely work that already existed in the older Edge instance, just made more seamless and with a proper allow-list to make it more secure.

It didn't take zero work but it didn't need an overhaul of the DOM or anything like that.

Best of luck! I do hope new Edge finds success :)

Zero and insignificant are not the same, but quite close. It doesn't have to take "zero" work to not hold them back.

Nor does it have to be the same team/people working on both.

As long as MS supports IE, we are mandated that we have to support IE. As far as I know, only IE11 is still supported by MS, but support will continues until 2025. The thought of all websites we build having to be compatible with IE11 until 2025 makes me sick. Is there any hope that rolling IE into Edge will shorten the time that IE11 is supported?

If it becomes a feature of Edge rathe than a standalone product, what is supported is now Edge (which has a feature allowing it to support legacy IE websites), not IE. That is, no one will be using a supported browser that only supports IE functionality, so while Edge users can access IE websites, there's no reason for anyone else to support IE in order to cater to those users, since they will actually be using a modern browser, not IE.

I have no idea why would I want to use Edge now. I used it for a few months and it was very nice. I liked the idea that they rolled their own engine, I wanted to support their courage just for that. I finally switched to Chrome because 1Password Edge extension was really buggy and crashed too often, while Chrome one works flawlessly (not Edge fault, of course), but I would definitely try it again in the future.

Now I can use Google Chrome or I can use Microsoft-branded Google Chrome. That's how I see it. If they would make worthy improvements, Google will adopt them. Otherwise Google is really company focused on browser, so I have no reason to choose Edge over Chrome now. IMO their decision to drop their own engine was very short-sighted. What next? Drop Windows kernel and adopt Linux with wine as a compatibility layer? Web need more diversity to keep open.

Probably gotta try Firefox once more, if I figure out how to sync it with iOS Safari...

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